Film
Saskia Baron
This long, fascinating documentary was apparently intended as the centrepiece of last autumn’s BFI celebration of the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. But Made in England was delayed while Martin Scorsese (executive producer, presenter, and narrator) and his editor Thelma Schoonmaker (Powell’s widow, who also gets a credit as an executive producer) put the finishing touches on Killers of the Flower Moon. It’s a shame in some ways that the expectation of screening Made in England meant that the BFI season didn’t include the excellent BBC Arena Read more ...
Justine Elias
Somewhere along a desert highway in the American Southwest, where there's not much to do besides get drunk, shoot guns, and pump iron, a stranger comes to town.In Love Lies Bleeding, a smart, sexy neo-noir, the drifter is a weightlifter named Jackie (Katy M O’Brian), who’s out to score a short-time cash gig to fund her way to bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas. On Jackie’s first night training at the local gym, though, there’s trouble: she fights off a handsy jock’s advances, preferring to lock eyes with the gym’s lonely manager, Lou (Kristen Stewart). This is New Mexico, 1989: two women Read more ...
James Saynor
The 21st century learnt afresh about the reality of carpet-bombed cities thanks to the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011. And the Syrian war-set movie Nezouh begins with a teenage girl huddled in a tight, enclosed space – perhaps the bunk bed of an underground shelter – fervently scratching some message of distress or emblem of yearning on a piece of board.Maybe we’re in a fictional version of the chilling Syria siege documentary The Cave from 2019. But moments later the girl, named Zeina, jumps out of bed to help her dad in the sun-lit living room of their comfortable Damascus flat. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Isabelle (Eva Green) leans over, her long hair catches fire from a candle, and Matthew (Michael Pitt) devotedly snuffs it out. She doesn’t miss a beat at this real-life accident, consumed already by The Dreamers’ closed world of a Left Bank apartment in May ’68, where sexual transgression stands for the barricades and baton charges outside.Bernardo Bertolucci’s adaptation of Gilbert Adair’s novel The Holy Innocents emphasises straight over gay sex, and further infuses it with cinephilia. Naïve American Matthew, bee-stung lips pursed and head tilted towards adventure, crosses the Seine to the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The last of the old maestros is standing tall. Marco Bellocchio was a Marxist firebrand when he made his iconoclastic debut with Fists in the Pocket (1965). Now aged 84, he makes intellectually and emotionally muscular, hit epics about abused Italian power.The Red Brigades’ fatal 1978 kidnap of former, reforming Prime Minister Aldo Moro in Good Morning, Night (2003) was followed by Mussolini’s persecution of his mistress and illegitimate son in Vincere (2009), a haunted turncoat’s survival of the Sicilian Mafia’s apocalyptic Eighties in The Traitor (2019), and a return to Moro in the six-hour Read more ...
Justine Elias
Earthrise, the 1968 Apollo 8 photograph of our small island of a planet, taken from the Moon’s surface, transformed our vision of our fragile home world. “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats,” wrote Archibald MacLeish, “is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold.”In I.S.S., a swift, smart science-fiction thriller set aboard the real-life international space station, a new crew member, Dr. Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose), is similarly awestruck, and humbled, by that Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
In director Pat Collins’s lyrical adaptation of John McGahern’s last novel, with cinematography by Richard Kendrick, the landscape is perhaps the most important character – though there’s a fine cast of well known mainly Irish actors.If you’re feeling hemmed in by concrete and city life, it’s a balm to take a deep breath and listen to the birdsong while watching the lake, the trees and the hills change colour through the seasons.Joe and Kate Ruttledge (Barry Ward and Anna Bederke) moved from London two years ago to live in this rural lakeside Irish community (it was filmed in Connemara). It’s Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Stephen is the first feature film by multi-media artist Melanie Manchot and it’s the best debut film I’ve seen since Steve McQueen’s Hunger. It’s gripping from the first frame to the last; the tension rarely lets up as we watch the main character lying and cheating his way through life as he struggles with addiction and is fleeced by card and loan sharks. In a heart-wrenching scene, his brother Paul (expertly played by Cam Riley) begs him to seek help.The film opens with Stephen (Stephen Giddings) watching The Arrest of Thomas Goudie, a film shot in 1901 about a real life bank clerk who Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
There’s a scene in Priscilla where Elvis stands above his wife, who is scrambling to put her clothes in a suitcase. Priscilla has just confronted him about a letter she found from the actress Ann-Margret, confirming her suspicion that the King of Rock'n'Roll has been unfaithful. Elvis's legs in their white trousers tower before her like the pillars of Graceland.This is just one of the many memorable images in Sofia Coppola’s delicate portrayal of Priscilla Presley, now available on Blu-ray and DVD. In the context of Coppola’s oeuvre, which includes such gems as The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The first photograph was taken nearly 200 years ago in France by Joseph Niépce, and the first picture of a person was taken in Paris by Louis Daguerre in 1838 (main picture). Some 20 years later, in California, Eadweard Muybridge settled a bet – as to whether a galloping horse maintains contact with the ground – by setting up a string of cameras to record the animal galloping past. When he flicked through the resulting sequence of stills, an illusion of movement was created, and film was born.Fantastic Machine is a high octane trawl through the social history of the Read more ...
Justine Elias
Music, when the singer’s voice dies away, vibrates in the memory. In the hypnotic new Irish horror film All You Need Is Death, those who search for long-unheard songs crave a certain melody that works a terrible magic on the living. In this pleasingly eldritch narrative debut by documentary-maker Paul Duane, it’s unclear whether the forbidden tune will turn out to be a love ballad, a curse, or both.Either way, the movie’s heroine, Anna (Simone Collins, pictured below), thrills at the thought of discovering for herself. Though she’s the talented frontwoman of a contemporary Irish folk group, Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Teenage Ulzii (Battsooj Uurtsaikh in an elegantly restrained performance) is looking after his little sister and brother in Ulaanbaatar after their illiterate mother has returned to the countryside to look for work. They’ve run out of coal and wood and it’s freezing inside their yurt. “If only we could hibernate, like bears. Never get cold, never catch the flu,” says the brother.Director Zoljargal Purevdash’s remarkable debut, the first ever Mongolian film in the Cannes official selection, features impressive non-professional actors. She put out a casting call for kids from the Yurt district Read more ...